Lear's afterlife

Shakespeare Survey

Volumn , Issue 55, 2002, Pages 67-81

  Joughin, John J ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 62449286129     PISSN: 00809152     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: 10.1017/ccol0521815878.006     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London, 1995), p. 4
2. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, it is precisely in escaping 'reasonable explanation' that Shakespeare's open-ended resistance to conceptual control might finally prove to be a far more crucial resource for critical thought, providing a form of access to the 'literary conditions' of philosophical questioning itself. See John J. Joughin, 'Philosophical Shakespeares: an introduction', in John J. Joughin, ed., Philosophical Shakespeares (London and New York, 2000), pp. 1-17
3. Charles Lamb, 'On the Tragedies of Shakespeare (1810-11)', in Frank Kermode, ed., Shakespeare: King Lear (Basingstoke, 1992), pp. 42-3
4. Samuel Johnson, 'Preface and Notes to King Lear (1765)', in Kermode, ed., Shakespeare: King Lear, p. 28
5. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (Basingstoke, 1992), p. 211
6. See Philip Armstrong, 'Uncanny Spectacles: Psychoanalysis and the Texts of King Lear', Textual Practice, 8: 3 (1994), 414-34; p. 416. I'm grateful to Armstrong for alerting me to Bradley's comments. As Armstrong's essay demonstrates there is a clear link to psychoanalytic theory here, particularly in relation to the play's staging of 'excessive affect'. I do not pursue that line of enquiry myself, although I will want to follow Armstrong in touching briefly upon Freud's sense of the 'uncanny'
7. For the time being though I would want to note that a more explicit link could be established between psychoanalytical criticism and the province of aesthetics; Freud himself makes the connection clear enough when he argues in the opening lines of his essay that: 'aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling'; see Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny', in James Strachey, ed., Complete Psychological Works, vol. 17, Standard Edition (London, 1963), pp. 217-56, p. 219
8. Barrie Rutter, 'Rutter Writes', in programme notes for Northern Broadsides touring production of King Lear (1999), no pagination
9. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The Stale of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London, 1994), p. 11 (Derrida's emphasis)
10. R. A. Foakes, 'Introduction', in W. Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes (Walton-on-Thames, 1997), p. 72
11. also compare Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy (New Haven, 1983), p. 11
12. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London, 1976), pp. 141-64
13. and compare Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle who offer an accessible and provocative overview of the paradoxical logic of literary endings in their Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Hemel Hempstead, 1999), pp. 251-9; see esp. pp. 253-4
14. R. A. Foakes, Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art (Cambridge, 1993), p. 211
15. Again compare Bennett and Royle, Introduction to Literature, p. 254
16. Freud, 'The Uncanny', passim
17. Johnson, 'Preface', 27-9; p. 28
18. Johnson, 'Preface'., 28, (Johnson's emphasis)
19. Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh, 1997), p. 175
20. See Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1987), p. 108, Cavell's emphasis
21. I'm also directly indebted here to Stephen Mulhall's exposition of Cavell in Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford, 1994), esp. pp. 198-9
22. I am grateful to Terence Hawkes for clarifying this distinction; compare his incisive account of 'The Heimlich Manoeuvre', Textual Practice, 8: 2 (1994), 302-16; cf. esp. p. 312
23. Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism, p. 179
24. George Steiner, Language and Silence (London, 1985), p. 22
25. Foakes, 'Introduction', 2
26. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London, 1990), p. 363
27. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Foakes, 1. 4. 221-2. All subsequent quotations from the play are taken from this edition
28. Francis Barker, The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History (Manchester, 1993), p. 15
29. Though of course, 'historicizing' Lear's percipient untimeliness presents us with another set of problems. In 'coming after' we are clearly confronted with a memory which refuses sequential narrativization. As such, we are confronted with what Lyotard terms an 'improper achronolgical effect', one which is nonetheless entirely contemporary in that it results from the continued shock of 'unassimilated traumatic experience'; see Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and 'The Jews', trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis, 1990), p. 16
30. For a fuller explication of Lyotard, to which I am directly indebted here, compare Nicola King, '"We come after": Remembering the Holocaust', in Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks, eds., Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present (Harlow, 1999), pp. 94-108, p. 97; I am also grateful to King for suggesting the epigraph for this section of the paper
31. See Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing (London and New York, 1997), pp. 1-28, esp. p. 2, I am indebted here and above to Critchley for providing some key distinctions concerning the problem of nihilism
32. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York, 1968), p. 13
33. also cited by Critchley in Very Little, pp. 7-8
34. See Critchley, Very Little, passim
35. For a fuller exposition see Roger Luckhurst, 'Memory Recovered / Recovered Memory', in Luckhurst and Marks, eds, Literature and the Contemporary, pp. 80-93, esp. 86-7
36. Foakes, in Foakes, ed., King Lear, p. 2
37. Again compare Critchley, Very Little, p. 23
38. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, pp. 116-17
39. also cited in Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca and London, 1997), p. 108. Elsewhere in the Lear essay of course Cavell draws a rather different distinction between spectatorship and character and the ability of the theatre to disclose the uneven (and potentially redemptive relationship) between the theatricalization and literalization of our relations with others. What though, I wonder, would Cavell make of Levring's The King is Alive which, in self-consciously aping the so called reality-TV format of survival shows like Big Brother and Survivor, is already all too literally implicated in dramatizing the theatricalization of its relationships with others. This makes for a particularly complex turn of Cavell's sense of the theatricalization of existence which I have not got time to examine here
40. Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns, p. 108
41. Although Halpern insists that 'Cavell's use of "we" . . . both indicts him as an individual and absolves him as a mere participant in a generalized abdication', see Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns, p. 109
42. See Jay Bernstein, 'Philosophy's Refuge: Adorno in Beckett', in David Wood, ed., Philosophers' Poets (London and New York, 1990), pp. 177-91; p. 183
43. Compare Critchley, Very Little, passim
44. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 101
45. Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, New York, 1998), pp. 412-13
46. also cited in Jay Bernstein, 'Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life: "The Truth about Hedda Gabler"', in Max Pensky, ed., The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern (Albany, New York, 1997), pp. 154-82; pp. 156-7. I should note that my understanding of Blanchot (though not my reading of Lear) is considerably indebted to Jay Bernstein at this point and in the arguments that follow, cf. esp. pp. 156-8
47. Bernstein, 'Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life', p. 157
48. Again compare Bernstein, 'Fragment'
49. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (London, 1964), p. 12
50. Bernstein, 'Philosophy's Refuge', p. 183
51. I owe this phrase to Critchley, Very Little, p. 27
52. See Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London, 1984), p. 354
53. but also compare the 'finale' to Adorno's Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London, 1978), p. 247
54. See Max Pensky, 'Editor's Introduction: Adorno's Actuality', in Max Pensky, ed., The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern (Albany, New York, 1997), pp. 1-21, see esp. p. 6 and p. 19, n. 8
55. See Pensky, 'Editor's Introduction', p. 10
56. and compare Eva Geulen, 'Theodor Adorno on Tradition', in Pensky, ed., The Actuality of Adorno, pp. 183-93, esp. p. 186
57. Again of course the register here is also Adornian. For a fuller explication of these 'temporal vocabularies' and for an explication of their significance for Adorno's work to which I'm indebted see Pensky, 'Editor's Introduction', p. 10
58. and Guelen, 'Theodor Adorno on Tradition', p. 186
59. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 407
60. Laurence Binyon, 'For the Fallen' in Helen Gardner, ed., The New Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford, 1972), p. 831
61. See Wendy Wheeler, 'Melancholic Modernity and Contemporary Grief: The Novels of Graham Swift', in Luckhurst and Marks, eds., Literature and the Contemporary, pp. 63-79, p. 78
62. Though I should note that both Wheeler and I are indebted in turn to the work of the philosopher Gillian Rose. Compare especially Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge, 1996)
63. Foakes, 'Introduction', p. 79
64. I borrow this phrase from Barker, The Culture of Violence, p. 11
65. Gillian Rose, Love's Work (London, 1995), p. 98
66. Again I'm grateful to Wendy Wheeler for pointing out the 'tie' between obligation and ligature, see Wheeler, 'Melancholic Modernity', in Luckhurst and Marks, eds., Literature and the Contemporary, p. 76
67. Nathum Tate, 'Dedication and Prologue to King Lear (1681)', in Kermode, ed., Shakespeare: King Lear, pp. 25-6
68. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 72